Vesper Flights Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Vesper Flights. Here they are! All 42 of them:

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You'll be boarding the nine twenty-one commercial flight as Shirley and Roderick Cliphorn." "Roderick Cliphorn?" Dan groaned. Only someone with a name like Sinead Starling would have considered that normal.
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Peter Lerangis (The Dead of Night (The 39 Clues: Cahills vs. Vespers, #3))
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What science does is what I would like more literature to do too: show us that we are living in an exquisitely complicated world that is not all about us. It does not belong to us alone. It never has done.
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Helen Macdonald (Vesper Flights)
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The attempt to see through eyes that are not your own. To understand that your way of looking at the world is not the only one. To think what it might mean to love those that are not like you. To rejoice in the complexity of things.
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Helen Macdonald (Vesper Flights)
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There's a special phenomenology to walking in woods in winter.
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Helen Macdonald (Vesper Flights)
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So many of our stories about nature are about testing ourselves against it, setting ourselves against it, defining our humanity against it.
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Helen Macdonald (Vesper Flights)
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(N)ot everything fits easily into our systems of classification. The world might be, it turns out, too complicated for us to know.
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Helen Macdonald (Vesper Flights)
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Literature can teach us the qualitative texture of the world. And we need it to. We need to communicate the value of things, so that more of us might fight to save them.
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Helen Macdonald (Vesper Flights)
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Hamilton dabbed a tissue at the cut under his eye. "Except for the time I met the Great Khali, that was the coolest thing I've ever done!" The foursome, only slightly the worse for wear, stood on the tarmac of the small airfield outside Milan, transferring their luggage from the limo to Jonah's jet for the flight back to Florence. "You didn't do anything, yo," Jonah seethed. "It was done to all of us by the freak show with the nerve to complain that the family branches are too violent!
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Gordon Korman (The Medusa Plot (39 Clues: Cahills vs. Vespers, #1))
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(T)he world is full of people busily making things into how they think the world ought to be, and burning huge parts of it to the ground, utterly and accidentally destroying things in the process without even knowing they are doing so. And that any of us might be doing that without knowing it, any of us, all the time.
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Helen Macdonald (Vesper Flights)
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We call them murmurations, but the Danish term, sort sol, is better: black sun.
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Helen Macdonald (Vesper Flights)
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When we meet animals for the first time, we expect them to conform to the stories we've heard about them. But there is always, always a gap. The boar was still a surprise. Animals are.
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Helen Macdonald (Vesper Flights)
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At times of difficulty, watching birds ushers you into a different world, where no words need to be spoken.
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Helen Macdonald (Vesper Flights)
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Later (swifts) gather higher in the sky...And then, all at once, as if summoned by a call or a bell, they rise higher and higher until they disappear from view. These ascents are called vesper flights....Vespers are evening devotional prayers, the last and the most solemn of the day, and I have always thought 'vesper flights' the most beautiful phrase, an ever-falling blue.
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Helen Macdonald (Vesper Flights)
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Most of all I hope my work is about a thing that seems to me of the deepest possible importance in our present-day historical moment: finding ways to recognise and love difference. The attempt to see through eyes that are not your own. To understand that your way of looking at the world is not the only one. To think what it might mean to love those that are not like you. To rejoice in the complexity of things.
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Helen Macdonald (Vesper Flights)
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I’ve used tarot too. Not often. But sufficient to know how little use the cards are in divining the future and to see how unerringly the cards reflect my deepest states of being, emotions I’d not let myself feel at the time.
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Helen Macdonald (Vesper Flights)
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When I saw Jurassic Park in the cinema something unexpected happened when the first dinosaur came on screen: I felt a huge, hopeful pressure in my chest and my eyes filled with tears. It was miraculous: a thing I'd seen representations of since I was a child had come alive.
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Helen Macdonald (Vesper Flights)
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Someone once told me that every writer has a subject that underlies everything they write. It can be love or death, betrayal or belonging, home or hope or exile. I choose to think that my subject is love, and most specifically love for the glittering world of non-human life around us.
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Helen Macdonald (Vesper Flights)
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For there’s an immense intellectual pleasure involved in making identifications, and each time you learn to recognise a new species of animal or plant, the natural world becomes a more complicated and remarkable place, pulling intricate variety out of a background blur of nameless grey and green.
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Helen Macdonald (Vesper Flights)
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For even if we don't believe in miracles, they are there, and they are waiting for us to find them.
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Helen Macdonald (Vesper Flights)
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Coming along the road towards me on his way to the covert, his head high, his body smeared all breast-deep in clay that stained the lower half of him copper ochre, came a fox hound, a pale hound. He was alone which was wrong. But being alone made him the type of all hounds that ever existed. He was running as if he'd been running all day, and he was running as if he would never stop, tongue out and eyes fixed. He was running to be with the rest of the hounds and the sound was drawing him along the rainy roads as if he were underwater and swimming up to the light to breathe. I was transfixed. I'd never seen a hound be a hound before. He was doing exactly what he needed to be doing. He was tired but joyful. He was late but getting there. Lost but catching up.
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Helen Macdonald (Vesper Flights)
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There are actions we can take that seem impossible and pointless and yet they are entirely, and precisely, and absolutely required. We can exert pressure, we can speak up, we can march and cry and mourn and sing and hope and fight for the world, standing with others, even if we don’t believe it. Even if change seems an impossibility. For even if we don’t believe in miracles, they are there, and they are waiting for us to find them.
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Helen Macdonald (Vesper Flights)
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I watch the cranes scratching their beaks with their toes and think of how the starling flocks that pour into reed beds like grain turn all of a sudden into birds perching on bowed stems, bright-eyed, their feathers spangled with white spots that glow like small stars. I marvel at how confusion can be resolved by focusing on the things from which it is made. The magic of the flocks is this simple switch between geometry and family.
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Helen Macdonald (Vesper Flights)
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Swifts aren't always cresting the atmospheric boundary layer at dizzying heights; most of the time they are living below it in thick and complicated air. That's where they feed and mate and bathe and drink and are. But to find out about the important things that affect their lives, they must go higher to survey the wider scene, and there communicate with others about the larger forces impinging on their realm....Not all of us need to make that climb...but as a community, surely some of us are required, by dint of flourishing life and the well-being of us all, to look clearly at the things that are so easily obscured by the everyday.
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Helen Macdonald (Vesper Flights)
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We need hard science to establish the rate and scale of these declines, to work out why it is occurring and what mitigation strategies can be brought into play. But we need literature, too; we need to communicate what the losses mean. I think of the wood warbler, a small citrus-coloured bird fast disappearing from British forests. It is one thing to show the statistical facts about this species’ decline. It is another thing to communicate to people what wood warblers are, and what that loss means, when your experience of a wood that is made of light and leaves and song becomes something less complex, less magical, just less, once the warblers have gone.
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Helen Macdonald (Vesper Flights)
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Farnsworth is one pioneer of a new multidisciplinary science, fit for an era in which weather radar has become so sensitive it can detect a single bumblebee over thirty miles away. It’s called aeroecology, and it uses sophisticated remote-sensing technologies like radar, acoustics and tracking devices to study ecological patterns and relationships in the skies. β€˜The whole notion of the aerosphere and airspace as habitat is not something that has come into the collective psyche until recently,’ Farnsworth says. And this new science is helping us understand how climate change, skyscrapers, wind turbines, light pollution and aviation affect the creatures that live and move above us.
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Helen Macdonald (Vesper Flights)
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...(T)he realisation that there is a particular form of intelligence in the world that is boar-intelligence, boar-sentience. And being considered by a mind that is not human forces you to reconsider the limits of your own.
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Helen Macdonald (Vesper Flights)
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(P)ulling at your heart on purpose is a compulsion as particular and disconcerting as pressing on a healing bruise.
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Helen Macdonald (Vesper Flights)
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Being sworn at by woodland creatures is disquieting, but comforting too...these alarm calls remind me that we have consequential presence, that the animals we like to watch are creatures with their own needs, desires, emotions, lives.
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Helen Macdonald (Vesper Flights)
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one honey fungus in Oregon covers almost four square miles and is thought to be nearly two and a half thousand years old.
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Helen Macdonald (Vesper Flights)
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The property belonged to our boss and his wife. A pebble-dashed box streaked with green algae, it had a pine paneled kitchen and a low ceiling sitting room with a Rayburn, a brown vinyl sofa, and eye-bending 1970s carpets that did bad things to you when you were drunk.
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Helen Macdonald (Vesper Flights)
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For years, on and off, I have woken in the dark, shouting out loud, stricken with horror at the impossible fact of death. It has been my most abiding and paralyzing terror. But it was Stu who banished it from me. At the hospice he looked me in the eye, very seriously, very quietly, and said, of what was happening to him. "It's okay. It's okay." I knew it was not, that what he was doing was reassuring me and it was an act of such generosity that for a while I couldn't find anything strong enough inside of me to reply. "It's okay," he said. "It's not hard.
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Helen Macdonald (Vesper Flights)
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Most of all I hope my work is about a thing that seems to me of the deepest possible importance in our present-day historical moment: finding ways to recognise and love difference. The
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Helen Macdonald (Vesper Flights)
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You are a man whose eyes are bright with unspilled tears when you tell me of the horror of your journey here.
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Helen Macdonald (Vesper Flights)
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With little else to do I rode my Vesper motor scooter from Harbel to Roberts Field. Perhaps there might be some excitement around the airport, but no such luck. Eric Reeves the Station Master and Air Traffic Controller was in the tower and was in communications with the incoming airliner. Everything was quiet in anticipation of a Pan American Clipper's arrival. On the ground floor all was quiet except for a solitary passenger in the terminal. Apparently he was waiting for the next flight out, which wasn't due for another two hours. As I approached him, I could see that he looked familiar…. I immediately recognized him as a world class trumpet player and gravel voiced singer from New Orleans. He must have seen the look on my face and broke the ice by introducing himself as Louie Armstrong. "Hi," I answered, "I'm Hank Bracker, Captain Hank Bracker." I noticed that he was apparently alone sitting there with a mountain of belongings which obviously included musical instruments. Here was Louis Armstrong, the famous Louie Armstrong, all alone in this dusty, hot terminal, and yes he had a big white handkerchief! He volunteered that the others in his party were at the club looking for something to eat. With no one else around, we talked about New Orleans, his music and how someone named King Oliver, a person I had never heard of, was his mentor. At the time I didn't know much about Dixie Land music or the Blues, but talking to Louie Armstrong was a thrill I'll never forget. In retrospect it’s amazing to find out that you don’t know what you didn’t know. I found out that he actually lived in Queens, NY at that time, not too far from where my aunt and uncle lived. I also found out that he was the Good Will Ambassador at Large and represented the United States on a tour that included Europe and Africa, but now he was just a friendly person I had the good fortune to meet, under these most unusual circumstances. His destination was Ghana where he, his wife and his band the All Stars group were scheduled to perform a concert in the capitol city of Accra. Little did I know that the tour he was on was scheduled by Edward R. Murrow, who would later be my neighbor in Pawling, New York. Although our time together was limited, it was obvious that he had compassion for the people of the "Third World Nations," and wanted to help them. Although after our short time together, I never saw Louie again but I just know that he did. He seemed to be the type of person that could bring sunshine with him wherever he went.…
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Hank Bracker
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So often we see solitary contemplation as simply the correct way to engage with nature. But it is always a political act, bringing freedom from the pressures of other minds, other interpretations, other consciousnesses competing with your own.
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Helen Macdonald (Vesper Flights)
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These alarm calls remind me that we have consequential presence, that the animals we like to watch are creatures with their own needs, desires, emotions, lives.
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Helen Macdonald (Vesper Flights)
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Science encourages us to reflect upon the size of our lives in relation to the vastness of the universe or the bewildering multitudes of microbes that exist inside our bodies. And it reveals to us a planet that is beautifully and insistently not human.
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Helen Macdonald (Vesper Flights)
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It’s reassuring to view the world on your own. You can gaze at a landscape and see it peopled by things – trees, clouds, hills and valleys – which have no voice except the ones you give them in your imagination; none can challenge who you are. So often we see solitary contemplation as simply the correct way to engage with nature. But it is always a political act, bringing freedom from the pressures of other minds, other interpretations, other consciousnesses competing with your own.
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Helen Macdonald (Vesper Flights)
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It was science that taught me how the flights of tens of millions of migrating birds across Europe and Africa, lines on the map drawn in lines of feather and starlight and bone, are stranger and more astonishing than I could ever have imagined, for these creatures navigate by visualising the Earth’s magnetic field through detecting quantum entanglement taking place in the receptor cells of their eyes.
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Helen Macdonald (Vesper Flights)
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Something impossibly heavy that held me in thrall, a scrap of the divine not good for my soul, a thing that should never have been fixed in place on tape to be repeatedly overheard, a thing that stood between me and the telling of secrets.
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Helen Macdonald (Vesper Flights)
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You cannot know what it is like to be a bat by screwing your eyes tight, imagining membranous wings, finding your way through darkness by talking to it in tones that reply to you with the shape of the world.
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Helen Macdonald (Vesper Flights)
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It is cold, and a loose wind blows through the darkness. But then, from the lower edge of the blank, black disc of the dead sun, bursts a perfect point of brilliance. It leaps and burns. It’s unthinkably fierce, unbearably bright, something (I blush to say it, but here it comes) like a word. And thus begins the world again. Instantly. Joy, relief, gratitude; an avalanche of emotion. Is all made to rights, now? Is all remade? From a bay tree, struck into existence a moment ago, a spectacled bulbul calls a greeting to the new dawn.
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Helen Macdonald (Vesper Flights)